Four students from a Berkeley charter school will be among the crowd passing through… more

Steven E.F. Brown

Four students from Cal Prep -- a charter school in which the University of California, Berkeley is a partner -- will be attending UC Berkeley in the fall.

The California College Preparatory Academy is in the old school building at St. Joseph the Worker Catholic church at Jefferson and Addison, just half a dozen blocks west of the UC Berkeley campus. The seven year old school just graduated its first senior class last year, and all of them were accepted to four-year colleges. One of those students went to UC Berkeley, which, although it is a partner in the school, does not give special consideration to Cal Prep's students in admissions decisions.

The students worked hard at the charter school. Garcia kept a 4.0 grade point average although she was pregnant and later raising a baby son. "I was the first student Cal Prep ever had that became pregnant and stayed during my pregnancy and after to finish my high school education," she said.

Alfaro, the daughter of immigrants, who grew up in a single-parent home, said, "Coming from a community that has a low rate of teenagers even graduating from high school and an even lower rate of matriculation into four-year colleges, I've had to fight for my education." She hopes to major in applied mathematics.

Banks, who got a full ride to UC Berkeley, said her education got off to a rough start because of learning disabilities that made elementary school "a living hell." Cal Prep, she said, "transformed an Oakland girl with no hopes to a cooperative citizen, who helps her peers when they need it and is a 4.0 student."

Anderson, who was raised by his grandmother and an older brother after his parents divorced and wandered "in and out of my life," plans to study psychology at UC Berkeley, "to make sure that families don't go through the same kind of situations that I went through."

Cal Prep is part of the charter school organization Aspire Public Schools, based on 22nd Avenue in the Embarcadero Cove area of Oakland, near the entrance to Coast Guard Island. Aspire has 12,000 students in 34 schools in California. The organization has seven schools in Oakland and one in East Palo Alto as well as Cal Prep in Berkeley.